Tag: Scripture

By the same spirit

There is freedom in getting away. There is friendship in breaking bread and eating together. There is awe in exploring Creation in the rolling hills in early fall. There is joy in worshiping together. There is peace in praying with and for each other. And when you bring close to 70 adults and youth together for a weekend away at The Claggett Center in Adamstown, Md., there is ever-present laughter waiting to bust loose.

This is the fourth consecutive season that Christ Church Easton has run The Alpha Course on Saturday evenings. Alpha is billed as an adventure to explore life, faith, and meaning. It’s also an opportunity to come together with like-minded people and build friendships. In the middle of the course is a weekend away, a chance to take a break from everyday life and create space and intention to shift your focus; a time to connect with each other and with God in Christ. God works in our lives and in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and that’s what Alpha presents us with, a chance to better understand and personally connect with the Holy Spirit. That starts with making space:

“The greatest need in our time is to clear out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our mind.” – Thomas Merton

Stepping back from daily life to step more fully into it, centered and recharged. That’s the goal. It sounds high-minded, but it’s also frequently hilarious. Some of my deepest soul/belly laughs in recent years have come on these weekends. There is a lightness of being that emanates from everyone there.

“At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” – Jean Houston

That kind of laughter, the kind that floats from the soul out to others and out into the universe. The kind of laughter that when shared, connects people, binds them together.

There is something to the setting at Claggett, the chance to hike through the woods, or walk a labyrinth, or skateboard paved trails, that puts the adventure card on the table.

“Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It’s not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He’s made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, ‘Let’s go do that together.'” -Bob Goff

 

That is part of what the weekend is about. Finding our own way, our own passion, making the most out of our lives by connecting, or re-connecting to our particular passions and gifts, despite what the world may say. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul writes in his letter to the Romans. Renewing our minds and hearts.

But a funny thing happens, as we try to do that individually, as we follow our own hearts and passions: we realize we are connected to those around us.

“There are different kinds of gifts, but the same spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.” – 1 Corinthians, 4-6.

We are all of the same spirit. We are united by the love of God and through the Holy Spirit, a gift Christ left to all of us. The gift of time away together is the chance to realize that, to feel and see it in a community of people, who through worship, prayer, breaking bread, laughter, tears, shared experience, grace and the Holy Spirit, become the body of Christ, for a time.

And you may ask yourself…how did I get here?

We all reach a point in our lives when we look around and wonder how we got here. Maybe not all of us, but I definitely do. A friend recently described present life as feeling like, “I accidentally got dropped into this weird world.”

David Byrne gets it.

And you may find yourself
living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world.
And you may find yourself
behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, well
how did I get here?

Sometimes I get the sense that part of that not knowing where we are is because we’ve forgotten we’re on a journey. We live life like it’s the same, day in and day out, then we look around not knowing where we stopped paying attention.

We were recently talking about faith–what is faith? How can you have faith? And when we talk about it in that way, when we frame the questions like that, what people often mean is faith as belief: how do I believe in something?  Faith is much bigger than belief, in the same way a mountain is much bigger than simply dirt and rock and a journey is more than crossing the street.

There’s plenty I don’t agree with theologian Marcus Borg about. But there is also a lot about what he has to say that excites me and gives me hope for what faith is and where it can lead. Borg, in a posthumously released book, “Days of Awe and Wonder,” asks what would happen if we look beyond our notion of faith as believing, and try to see Christian life as a journey:

“To be on a journey is to be in movement… A journey is a process that involves our feet as well as our minds and our heads. A journey involves following a path or a way. To be on a journey is not to be wandering aimlessly, though there are many times when it feels like that; people have gone on this journey before us, and there is a trail, a path, a way that we are called to. The journey image suggests that the Christian life is more like following a path than believing with our minds.”

If we allow that our life is a journey, it makes sense that the view is going to change along the way. And maybe if we walked looking through that lens, we’d key into when changes are taking place.

Borg digs back and looks at ancient meanings of the word faith as used in Scripture. He unpacks three: 1) Faith as trust (the opposite of which is anxiety), 2) Faith as fidelity (to our relationship with God), and 3) “Faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that which we live and move and have our being.”

And he points out the different ways we can see the whole, the universe, in which we live and move and have our being: we can see it as hostile towards us, indifferent towards us, or we can “see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us.” Let’s lean into the last option, gracious, nourishing, supportive.

And here’s a part I fully dig:

“Faith is thus about setting out on a journey in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into. We are invited to make that journey, that journey of faith, in which we learn to trust our relationship to God, learn to be faithful to that relationship, and learn to see it in a new way. We will be led in that journey into an ever more wondrous and compassionate understanding of our lives with God.”

If we look beyond faith as being as simple as belief, and we see it as trusting God, setting out on a journey to learn how to be in relationship with Him and with each other, and building that relationship over a continuing journey into more wonder, more compassion, more understanding; that’s a journey, an adventure I want to wake up to, dig into, and live into every day.

Scripture, Small Groups & Ephesians

This week at Christ Church Easton, we kick off a small group study of The Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians. The build up, the study, the reflection, and prayer has led me to think about the nature of Scripture and how we read it and relate to it. And why. I doubt it’s a coincidence that one of my go-to thinkers, Richard Rohr, is spending this week talking about Scripture:

Serious reading of Scripture will allow you to find an ever-new spiritual meaning for the liberation of history and your own soul as you discover that the text holds truth on many levels… Sacred texts will always maximize your possibilities for life, love, and inclusion, which is precisely why we call them sacred.

The liberation of our own soul and maximizing possibilities for life, love, and inclusion–not a bad way to spend our time. I also love Frederick Buechner’s thoughts on reading the Bible:

If you look AT a window, you see flyspecks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look THROUGH a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a holy bore and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past and into the depths of ourselves. 

There is so much to be gained by a thoughtful, in depth reading and study of the Bible. But it’s not easy going it alone. It’s a communal document, passed down by multiple people, for multiple people. It’s a living document, a living Word, that can open us up to more when looked at and wrestled and reckoned with together.

At a worship service, we can hear the Word. We can listen and reflect on it. But we don’t have a chance to discuss it. That’s what small groups are for. In looking at the reason for small group study, Carolyn Taketa writes:

When we take the risk of being authentic with a small group of people, we can experience God’s grace and love coming through others, which leads to freedom and transformation

John Ortberg writes: “God uses people to form people. That is why what happens between you and another person is never merely human-to-human interaction–the Spirit longs to be powerfully at work in every encounter.” So the goal of small groups is to create the environments where Spirit-driven, life-giving experiences can flourish.

The need for these kind of life-giving experiences, that kind of interaction and helping foster that kind of community is part of what compelled me to follow a calling to lead small groups.

What better place to start than Ephesians?

Bob Deffinbaugh calls Ephesians “the Rolls Royce of the epistles.” And he cites William Hendricksen’s “Exposition of Ephesians,” which calls the letter:

“the divinest composition of man,” “the distilled essence of the Christian religion,” “the most authoritative and most consummate compendium of the Christian faith,” that is “full to the brim with thoughts and doctrines sublime and momentous.”

If someone had to write a movie trailer for Ephesians, I would sign Hendricksen up on the spot.

Life has a funny way of working itself out. Twenty years ago, I would have told you that the texts I would be wrestling with in my 40s would be Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and the heavy hitters of continental philosophy and phenomenology. Looking back, it is clear to me that that would have been an academic exercise. I have lived and watched over that time as my head and my heart have become synchronized and moved into alignment with one another. I want to put that same spirit of inquiry into not just words, but the Word, and not just for study, but for living.

And so maybe it comes back to Ephesians, which seems the perfect place to start, when it is time to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

This is just the beginning.